In Antigua and Barbuda, customer relationships are personal. The owner remembers the couple who come back every February, the captain who always orders from the same chandlery, the client who prefers WhatsApp to email. As a business grows, that knowledge needs to live somewhere other than one person’s memory. That is the job of a CRM.
What Mailpro’s CRM features cover
Mailpro is an email and SMS marketing platform with built-in contact management, rather than a heavyweight sales suite. For many small and mid-sized businesses on the islands, that is exactly the right size:
- A central contact database with contact management tools to import, deduplicate and organise lists.
- Custom fields for what matters to you: country of residence, last stay, boat name, preferred branch, CIP application stage.
- Campaign history per contact: which emails they opened, which links they clicked.
- Forms and surveys that update contact records automatically.
- Segments that refresh as data changes, ready for email or SMS.
If you already use a sales CRM, Mailpro can connect to it, for example through its Salesforce integration or Zapier.
How different sectors use it
Hotels and villas
Track guests across stays, note preferences and send the right offer at the right time: a winter return offer to February regulars, a Carnival package to guests who came in August.
Yachting
Charter brokers and marinas keep records of vessels, captains and owners, and segment them by season and boat size ahead of the April regattas.
Citizenship by Investment and real estate
Licensed agents and developers manage enquiries from many countries, with fields for stage, language and preferred contact time. Communications must stay accurate and professional; a CRM keeps the history in one place.
Retail and services
Loyalty programmes, birthday offers and service reminders for local customers across Antigua and on Barbuda.
Data protection built in
A CRM holds exactly the kind of personal data the Data Protection Act, 2013 governs. The Act asks you to collect data for a lawful purpose, keep it accurate, protect it, let people access and correct it, and delete it when it is no longer needed. Mailpro stores contacts on private Swiss infrastructure, outside US jurisdiction, with TLS 1.3 encryption, and never sells or rents your data. For clients from the EU, Switzerland’s EU adequacy decision is a further reassurance.
Setting up your contact base: a practical order
- Gather your lists. Booking-system exports, spreadsheets, old newsletter lists, business cards from trade shows.
- Keep only people you may contact. Separate those who agreed to marketing from those who only booked or enquired. The Data Protection Act expects consent for marketing use.
- Agree your fields. Decide on a short, consistent set, for example country, customer type, last visit and language, so that everyone on the team records the same things.
- Standardise phone numbers. Store them in full international format, +1 268 for local numbers, so SMS works later.
- Import and deduplicate. Guests often appear several times with different spellings or old addresses.
- Connect your forms. From now on, new contacts arrive already tagged and with a consent record.
Priced by sends, not contacts
Many CRMs and marketing tools charge by the number of contacts stored. For a tourism business with years of past guests, that adds up. Mailpro charges for the messages you send, so keeping a large history does not raise your bill.
New to the idea? Read what a CRM is and why it matters in Antigua and Barbuda.